Tim Adams on the role of parents in creating tennis champions

I blame the parents. The parents of British tennis players, that is. They are not crazy enough to create Wimbledon champions. They don't string tennis balls above their babies' cots to improve their hand-eye coordination (like Mike Agassi), and then have their toddlers play in the midday sun in the Nevada desert to improve their resistance to heatstroke. They don't tamper with their wife's contraceptive arrangements in order to produce two more strapping girls, and then devise a personal daily schedule that risks drive-by shootings on the public courts in the worst area of their city (like Richard Williams). They don't yell "kick him in the slats, Jimmy!" from the stands (like Gloria Connors), or respond to dodgy line calls by suggesting that umpires are Nazis responsible for the bombing of Yugoslavia (Damir Dokic). They have never mustered even a single restraining order between them.

Tennis has always required more parental involvement than other sports for a couple of reasons - top players start very young and, because they are not part of a team, they have to make their own travel arrangements. But there is more to it than that - the level of obsessional focus required to reach the top of the game requires the kind of psychological cocoon that only a certain type of family environment can create. Some players are born to hit a ball, but the ambition to hit it harder and more accurately than anyone on the planet must be inculcated early. Like those geeky parents who push their kids to be maths prodigies by drilling them in algebra before they can walk, so tennis parents invariably play out all their internal dramas in their sons' and daughters' backhands and forehands. In Malcolm Gladwell's recent book, Outliers, he suggests that geniuses in any field are those with talent who have managed to get an unnatural advantage early in life. He quantifies that ability as the opportunity for a gifted individual to get in 10,000 hours of practise before his or her peers.

Look into the biography of almost any grand-slam champion and you will see that advantage. Borg got it hammering a ball against his garage door sometimes eight hours a day, seven days a week. He played out an endless internal Davis Cup match in his head between the US and Sweden. Sweden never lost. Rafael Nadal, born into a family of sportsmen - an uncle was an international footballer - was coached into playing with his "wrong" left hand at the age of five because another of his uncles (a former tennis pro) perceived it would be an advantage and make him more single-minded. Novak Djokovic was encouraged by his parents to practise as a boy in his native Belgrade in an abandoned swimming pool while US air strikes targeted the city - he made sure he got there early in the mornings before the bombers did.

You can trace this kind of relationship back to French champion Suzanne Lenglen, who won six titles at Wimbledon and six at Paris between 1914 and 1926; Lenglen was the creation of her father, Charles. He put her on a strict tennis regime when she started school, and forced her repeatedly to hit a handkerchief he placed on the court. She came to loath that handkerchief, but she never missed it. Like all subsequent prodigies, her glittering career was dogged by a sense of the childhood she had sacrificed for it.

You could argue that it says something for the British system that we have never produced a family able to make those extreme kinds of sacrifices. Virtually all British players' regrets in the years since Fred Perry's victories at Wimbledon in the 1930s have come on court, not off it. The model of British tennis parents comes in the example of the Henmans, who for more than a decade offered gritted-teeth support to their not-quite-all-conquering son. The Henmans never spoke to the press (and only rarely to each other while play was in progress); they responded to the agonies of their firstborn with little winces and half-sighs, and they seemed slightly aghast at Henmania.

In this respect, Andy Murray arrives with a massive advantage. His mother, Judy, is the closest we have come in recent years to a homegrown champion tennis parent. She started her boys young on a regime of her own devising; she tries not to watch Andy playing - too stressful - but when she does, she cannot contain herself. She rails frequently in her coaching role with the Lawn Tennis Association about the inability of British kids to get out of "a comfort zone because of the way they've been brought up". It remains to be seen whether the Murray clan are mad enough to create world beaters, but it will no doubt be nerve-wracking watching them try.

In the meantime, if you have missed out on your pre-school 10,000 hours, and you have no particular desire to escape your comfort zone, there is that other great British tennis tradition to which any one of us can aspire: that of the stylish nearly-man. The second part of this exclusive guide is here to help ...